Buttrynyms: My self-indulgent attempt to master Tumblr

It’s easy to justify ignoring a tool you know is useful, because you have so many tools to use and so little time. But I want to keep learning about social tools and I sort of need to for my job. So it’s always kind of nagged at me that I haven’t done more with Tumblr.

I gave it a try three years ago during the Super Bowl with a Tumblr on trivia about Super Bowl quarterbacks. Somehow that topic caught my fancy back in the 1970s, when I noticed that six of the first eight Super Bowls were won by four different quarterbacks from Alabama (Bart Starr twice and Joe Namath) and Purdue (Len Dawson and Bob Griese twice). So I spent the day of the Super Bowl (maybe the day before, too; I can’t remember) tumbling about Super Bowl quarterback trivia. I don’t think anyone noticed. I got more response to a few tweets this year about quarterback trivia. And besides, that’s kind of a one-day blog. Or at best a couple weeks a year. How could it catch on?

Tumblr works best with visuals and I wasn’t posting photos or gifs of the Super Bowl quarterbacks, just questions. So that was a bust, but I kind of got my feet wet.

I used visuals and was more persistent with my DFM Engagement Tumblr, but again, I saw no sign that people were actually engaging with it or reading it at all. (We’re still engaging; maybe I’ll catch it up sometime and give it another try.)

I was amused/flattered by our CEO’s recent reference to me as our newsrooms’ Educator in Chief. Then this week, I was called a honcho and a news futurist blogger (guilty). So I decided to have some self-indulgent Tumblr fun with how the Internet refers to me, noting that I’ve self-inflicted some unusualtitles (with a prod from another CEO).

I will try to make it more funny than boastful. I won’t include all of Mimi’s references to me (I make it into her tweets often), though I used a few when I was getting my initial posts up last night.

I welcome your advice. How do I make a Tumblr blog successful? (What is success?) How do I Tumbl better? Where are the best posts with advice for journalists using Tumblr?

I don’t know how often I’ll update (the Internet isn’t talking about me constantly, fortunately). Occasionally I’ll dig up some past references in an attempt to keep it fresh. And maybe I’ll finally master Tumblr.

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6 Responses

I’ve been tinkering, too, but find myself wondering if this is the right playground for me. Count me among your new followers. This was how I let my very few followers and fellow Norwegian-Americans in on my long-awaited trip to Norway. http://www.tumblr.com/blog/cyanpixelnorge and this is for my regular stuff — http://cyanpixel.tumblr.com — which gives you some idea how interesting my life izzzzzzzzzzz.My most recent post is from the end of June. For me, it is a distant third to Facebook and Twitter, but at least higher than Pinterest.

I’ve been using tumblr for about 6 years now for personal reasons. For me, it’s the most entertaining form of social media. I follow almost 500 people so my feed is constantly updated with the most random, informative and entertaining content.

Like you mentioned, picture posts are what get the most circulation. Because of this reason, I created a tumblr for The Times Herald featuring our favorite file photos or ones that I’ve just found to be interesting. You can see the tumblr here: http://norristown-timesherald.tumblr.com/. While the success wasn’t extreme, by using hashtags of locations and names, we’ve received “likes” and “reblogs” on every one of our posts (note: hashtags are VERY important on tumblr — they make your posts show up in searches — and spaces should be used inbetween words in phrases, names, etc. – hastags work differently on tumblr than other other forms of social media like twitter and instagram).

I would definitely suggest some seemingly obvious but helpful things that you probably know from being a WordPress user– but change your theme to something a little less basic and tag the heck out of yours posts! From my experiences with Tumblr, it is more of a chance to give your readers an insight into who you are and why you are who you are–not so much what you do. People on Tumblr are just looking for the next trendy thing and creating relationships with strangers over common bonds! Just being personable and funny will get you a long way! It’ll probably take a while to grow a following (it took me a good 7 months), but once you get there Tumblr will be a tool worth using!